Many vehicles are equipped with spoken dialog, voice activated, or voice controlled vehicle systems. Spoken dialog systems may perform functions, provide information, and/or provide responses based on verbal commands. A spoken dialog system may process or convert sounds (e.g., speech produced by a vehicle occupant) from a microphone into an audio signal. Speech recognition may be applied to the audio signal, and the identified speech may be processed by a semantic interpreter. Based on the interpretation of the verbal command, a system such as a dialogue control system may perform an action, generate a response, or perform other functions. A response may, for example, be in the form of a visual signal, audio signal, text to speech signal, action taken by a vehicle system, or other notification to vehicle occupants.
The clarity and decipherability of voice commands may affect the function of a voice activated vehicle system. A microphone may often, however, receive a signal with speech and non-speech related sounds reducing the clarity of voice commands. Non-speech related sounds may include vehicle related noises (e.g., engine noise, cooling system noise, etc.), non-vehicle related noise (e.g., noises from outside the vehicle), audio system sounds (e.g., music, radio related sounds), and other sounds. The non-speech related sounds may often be louder than, overpower, and/or distort speech commands. As a result, a speech recognition system or method may not function properly if non-speech related sounds distort speech commands. Similarly, the accuracy of system such as a dialogue control system in generating responses to speech commands may be reduced by non-speech related sounds. Non-speech related sounds may, for example, distort or overpower text to speech responses, audio, and other signals output from a spoken dialogue system and/or other systems. Thus, a system or method to enhance speech recognition, dialogue control, and/or speech prompting systems based on sound or acoustic related vehicle information is needed.